TEI stands for The Text Encoding Initiative. It is an international consortium, which develops and maintains the TEI Guidelines as a recommended standard for representating texts in digital form. TEI was founded in 1987. The reason to establish TEI was the necessity to produce a set of guidelines for the creation, use and interchange of electronic texts initially in the fields of humanities, social sciences and linguistics.

The outcome of the intensive work was a set of TEI Guidelines specifying encoding methods for machine-readable texts.

Currently, the areas of interest of the TEI consortium include not only the TEI Guidelines, but also a variety of supporting resources, such as tools for or adapted to the TEI, tutorials, TEI relevant publications and lots more.

The individuals, groups or organisations, which have an interest to collaborate in the development of Guidelines, can become a member of TEI consortium or create the TEI Special Interest Group.

Currently there are many TEI Special Interest Groups (SIGs):

• Correspondence
• Education
• Libraries
• Manuscripts
• Music
• Ontologies
• Scholarly Publishing
• TEI for Linguists
• Text and Graphics
• Tools

In our context the work of SIG “TEI for Linguists” is particularly relevant. The key objectives are to develop a set of recommendations for encoding of language resources with TEI markup. The SIG “TEI for Linguists” collaborates with researchers working within ISO/TC 37/SC 4, making the work effective and efficient.